Guest Post From Laura: Part 2

Marlo’s healing process took about two weeks.  The whole time she had the stitches, she had to wear the e-collar and couldn’t play with any toys or bones, since the collar wouldn’t allow her to hold the toys to her mouth. When she was taking more of the pain medication in the beginning, she mostly slept, wandered around in a daze, and slept some more. Once she started feeling better, she was a little more difficult to care for.  She wanted to play, not realizing that catching a stitch with her toenail or getting tripped up in her e-collar would mean another painful ride to the vet. The collar made it difficult for her to jump up onto the couch or bed. 

Now she’s had her stitches out and is completely back to normal (minus one eye). It looks like she’s just constantly winking at you.  She runs around with her Riley friend, eats her bones and plays tug-o-war just like she always has. We haven’t made a trip to the dog park since the fight, mostly because I’m a bit leery about introducing her to new dogs again so soon.  I think I’m more cautious now about Marlo than Marlo is. She’s just back to the same puppy she used to be.

More about Marlo and Riley

Marlo (AKA 'The Goodwill Puppy') was found at a Goodwill.  Laura was in college when she and her friend were shopping there. They saw Marlo hanging out in the parking lot, and lured her out from under a car with a cracker.  She was very stinky, and it took several baths to get her to smell normal. This had to be done covertly, since Laura and her friend still lived in the dorms and pets were not allowed. To make the secretive matters worse, Marlo would cry when left alone in the dorm room, so Laura and her friends took turns sitting with Marlo while the other friends were in class. Laura tried to get someone else to adopt Marlo, but no one could so Marlo has remained Laura’s dog ever since.  She is very faithful and good at following instructions.  She looks like a Boston terrier, except bigger, but not a lot. 

In case you can't tell, Riley loves to have her belly rubbed.

I adopted Riley when she was a few months old from a local animal shelter.  She loves people.  Actually, my belief is that her soul will die if she not touching a person.  If I am sitting on the couch she will sit on top of me.  If I am sitting in an office chair she will climb on top of me.  If two people are sitting right next to each other she will sit on both of them.  The more people she can touch at the same time the better. She is weird.

Riley also loves to play, but not at the dog park.  She has to be at someone’s house to play.  She is getting better at the dog park though.  Both she and Marlo have a history of wandering around sniffing far away from the other dogs.  Occasionally, Riley will play, but she can get overwhelmed if two dogs try to play at once.  She also gets highly offended when other dogs try to sniff her.  She will almost literally jump straight up to get away and keeps her tail down, but she is fine with sniffing other dogs.  She is weird.

Riley Comes Home: A Guest Post by Riley

 I am spying on the monster. It is eating from Marlo's food bowl. She will be mad.

My friend Marlo was hurt and had to have her eye removed last week.  I went with Elizabeth back to her parents' house with Misha and Priss so that Marlo could get better without me trying to play with all the time.  I have had fun, but now Misha is tired of playing with me all the time and Marlo is better so I get to go home! 

When I got home there was something else in the house and Marlo was gone.  I think it was a monster.  It has a weird.......excuse me.....arf arf arf! Woooowooooo!

 Sorry, I had to go play with a bunny in my yard. They like to come in and let me chase them! It's fun!

Anyway. This monster in the house. It has a weird head, which is probably trying to eat me.  I am keeping my distance and running away every time it comes close or hops on the same couch as me.  I am trying to inspect the monster, but it keeps turning around and looking at me with its big, round eyeball. I think in people language, this is a cyclops.

Update: I have determined that the monster is actually Marlo, she is just wearing a crazy hat.  Perhaps she was abducted by aliens, I don’t know, I’m not an expert. Maybe the bunnies won the last game of tag. Who knows!  Her new hat is making it very difficult to play.  I like to grab her legs and neck, but her collar-hat is very in the way.  The people will not remove it.  I do not know why, they should remove her collar when I want to play.  Dear people, please fix this. I want to play.

Guest Post From Laura: Part 1

The night Marlo got in a fight with Misha was probably the most traumatic night of my life. No kidding. I’m not easily upset or scared, and I can be really calm during emergencies and stressful situations. But when I saw my puppy in a fight with another dog, I have to admit I lost it a little bit. I screamed, I yelled and I cried.  Breaking up a dog fight can be really scary, and all the ‘NO!’ yelling and screaming didn’t really help at all, but I did it anyway.  Part of me was hoping the yelling would distract the dogs and maybe make them stop fighting, but part of it came from an emotional reaction to a terrible situation.

Watching Marlo get hurt was a terrible experience; I felt powerless to help her, even though I was doing all I could to break up the fight.  Taking her to the vet was even scarier.  The whole way there, she was fairly calm and just looking out the window like she normally does on car rides.  I was worried that there was something very wrong with her, especially since she wasn’t acting like she was in pain. She was also bleeding a lot. Though now I realize it wasn’t actually that much blood, I was worried that it would take too long to get to the vet, and she would die on the way.  All of these irrational fears were running around in my head for the whole trip.

Once we got to the vet, I felt a lot better. The people at the clinic were very nice, and the doctor explained everything to me very calmly, which helped me calm down a bit. Making the final choice to remove Marlo’s eye, however, was very difficult. The vet said there was very little chance that the eye could be saved, and that even if it was, there was a pretty big risk of infection and complications later on. He reassured me that dogs do very well without an eye, but I was worried about a lot of things: Would she be able to see as well with one eye? Would her personality change because of the fight and the loss of her eye? Would I be grossed out by her lack of an eye? Would she live through the surgery?

Once I got back home (while Marlo was still at the vet), I really felt like I’d just been hit by a train. My body felt physically heavy, and I was tired, worried, and sad all at the same time. I was able to go to sleep, but once I woke up in the morning, my head started racing again, worrying about my puppy.

Marlo comes home, Minus One Eye

Poor Marlo! She is so happy to see her people when they came to pick her up, but she's so confused, too! Because of the silly collar, her head is much wider than she remembers it being, so getting through doors is hard.

We picked up Marlo from the vet and brought her home after her surgery. We were relieved to have her back with us after such a stressful night worrying about her. At first, she just staggered around like a drunk dog.  Her medicine made her woozy and sleepy.  Going outside under the influence and wearing this stupid collar (an e-collar, as it is officially known - Laura calls it a 'hat'), was actually quite a challenge.  Her head was about 8 inches wider than she thought it should be, and every time the edge of the collar caught against a door frame or piece of furniture, Marlo would just stop walking and stand there until one of her people fixed her lampshade. Eating from food bowls is also trickier now. If the collar is not just right around the bowl, poor Marlo can't get any food out and this confuses her. She is still not eating a lot yet.  I'm pretty sure this is mostly because the vet spoiled her with chicken. For now, she will get turkey slices mixed with her dog food...but only for now.

She is on three medicines: a pain medicine called Tramadol, an anti-inflammatory called Rimadyl, and an antibiotic called Cephalexin. We have to give each of these to her two to three times a day.  She'll be on the antibiotics for almost two weeks, but the pain medicine can be tapered off over the next few days.  The schedule of her medicines is bad right now.  One of them we have to give her at three a.m., but we will fix that as soon as possible.

I am still a bit freaked out by her lack of an eye, but she seems to be handling it very well.

P.S. She has purple eyelashes. (Her stitches are purple.)

How Marlo came to be the One-Eyed Monster Dog

Part 3: The Surgery

And now for the technical details...

While Marlo was being examined the Vet gave us several options for treatment.

The least expensive and least complicated was to give Marlo some pain medicine, bandage her eye, and send her home.  This was going to cost around $300.  We would also have to take her to either our regular vet or to a veterinary ophthalmologist, where we would, again, have to pay hundreds of dollars for consultations and eventually surgery. 

Using her 'third eyelid' that was mentioned in the last post would cost around $500. In the end, this wasn't an option for Marlo because of the severity of her injury.  This procedure also isn't guaranteed to heal the eye, and your pet may need to return and have additional surgery to ultimately remove his eye after all.

We decided that the best option for Marlo was a complete enucleation. The surgery requires a general anesthetic and is supposed to take around two hours. Marlo also had some tests done before the surgery to make sure that all of her organs were properly functioning in order to metabolize the anesthetic. In this operation, the entire eyeball is removed and the nerves, veins, and arteries serving the eye are cauterized. The eye lid is sewn shut and remains permanently shut. This procedure alone was around $1200. Laura was reluctant to agree to this option, but we knew it would be best for Marlo. Marlo was originally first in line for surgery, but another pet was brought in that was in worse shape after we left, so she had to wait a few more hours. The vet called us when she finished surgery and let us know that everything went well. We had to leave her at the vet until she woke up from surgery several hours later.  From the time we got to the vet to the time we were able to pick her up was around twelve hours. 

In the meantime, we did some research. We found out that some dogs have the option of getting a replacement globe. This globe can be inserted to give the eye shape and keep the skin from sinking in. This is not a replacement eye, or even a prosthetic. The plastic globe only keeps the facial skin from shifting and looking weird. The fitting for this placeholder must be done by a veterinary ophthalmologist. However, since Marlo's case was an emergency, there wasn’t time to consult a specialist. Marlo is also a Boston Terrier mix, and these dogs don’t usually make good candidates for this operation, since their eye sockets are too shallow to begin with. 

We learned later that dogs can have prosthetic eyes implanted. Of course, they can’t see with the prosthetics; this is a purely cosmetic surgery. Once the implant is in, the dogs must receive daily eye drops for the rest of their lives, and the prosthetics are prone to infection. We decided this wasn’t a realistic option for Marlo. We aren't millionaires. Really, though, the decision was made more out of consideration for Marlo than cost alone. Who wants to torture their dog with daily eye drops and future infections? Not me.

We decided that we could still love Marlo without an eye. We could even love her without a weird, fake-looking, fake eye.

Now she is the One-Eyed Monster Dog.

Here are some good resources we found when trying to learn more about the surgery:

Pet Place is a good resource for eye removal in dogs.

Pet Health is a website about general pet health.

Beag's Corner is dog health from 'The Beag's' perspective.  This page is specifically about eye proptosis.

Blind Dog is people sharing stories about their pets losing an eye.  It is more emotional, but it lets you know your pet will be ok.

How Marlo came to be the One-Eyed Monster Dog

Part 2: The Trip to the Vet

During the car ride, Marlo was pretty calm.  She did not act hurt or upset. She just wanted to look out the window. Laura, on the other hand, was pretty upset. I think she was worried Marlo would bleed to death, or that there were more serious internal injuries that we didn’t know about.  It was really hard to look at Marlo with her eye bleeding and her face covered in blood.

Once we got to the vet, Marlo was less calm.  Marlo hates the vet.  She growled at the staff members every time they touched her, even after she had been sedated.  At first there was a slight hope that she would be able to keep her eye if we tried a process using her third eyelid.  Basically, the vet sews the third eyelid over the eyeball to protect it and promote healing, in hopes that the eye will repair itself. This only works if the damage is minor and if the cornea is not hurt.  Even if the eye is a candidate for this procedure, there are often complications and infections that can show up later on, making it necessary to remove the eye after all.  After the vet got a chance to better inspect her wound, we found out that Marlo would not be able to see again from that eye since Misha’s tooth had directly punctured her eye instead of just lacerating it. The vet said Marlo’s eye was ‘unresponsive.’ Basically, the eye was looking in the wrong direction and there was a lot of bleeding. So Marlo stayed overnight at the hospital for a surgery called enucleation.

How Marlo came to be the One-Eyed Monster Dog

Part 1: The Dog Fight

My girlfriend, Laura, and I were pet-sitting my parents’ two dogs because they were out of town.  We also have two dogs of our own, and as you can imagine, having four dogs running around has been awesome fun.  The pups had been getting along really well, with just a minor tussle over the ownership of a puppy bed.  I had been worried because one of our family dogs is a boxer, Misha, and, while she is not a mean dog, she just is not sure about other dogs getting too close to her people, and she does not want other dogs eating her food, except for my parents’ other dog, Priss. Priss is an old pug with bladder cancer.  She is not interested in playing with anyone else.  She just likes to sleep, occasionally play with her toys, and pee every thirty minutes (even at night).  I have taken Riley to my parents’ house several times and they all play really well.  We already knew Riley would be happy; the more puppy playfriends for her, the better.

Another thing that worried me was that Marlo is an ‘alpha dog,’ or as we learned from the vet, has ‘little-dog syndrome.’  She barks at every dog when we are on walks and can be territorial.  We carefully introduced the dogs outside.  While they were initially wary of each other, nothing bad happened.  The dogs did their sniffing routine and they were OK with each other.  We also did not leave them alone until we were sure they were not going to eat each other. Things had been going well for about a week, but that quickly changed.

One night after dinner, when my girlfriend and I were cleaning up, we heard the barking and growling of a dog fight. We got to Marlo and Misha almost immediately, but there was damage.  At first, we could not get them apart because Marlo had an alligator death grip on Misha’s leg.  Unfortunately, when we did, we saw that Marlo’s eye was bleeding.  We rushed to the car and sped to the animal hospital.